Nordic Software Summit 2025 – Part 2: The internationalization journey
- Marie-Louise Cleeren
- Sep 10
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 31
I recently attended the Nordic Software Summit 2025 in Stockholm, a full-day event gathering some 1200+ SaaS founders and executives at the Stockholm Waterfront Congress Center for inspiration, practical advice and guidance on how to scale up their tech business.
Here are some of my take-aways on the internationalization journey.
How to choose your next market
Johan Blomdahl, CEO of TimeEdit (a Monterro portfolio company), and Peter Larsson, Co-Founder of Monterro, led a break-out session, and shared a lot of practical learnings and tips on how to choose your next market. Here’s a recap:
Go where you can build trust
Assess readiness – before you go international, you should have:
Demonstrated product market fit, probably >€3M in ARR (annual recurring revenue)
A healthy and happy customer base
Organizational buy-in
Ownership buy-in (time and money)
Picking the destination
Opportunity > Proximity
Follow the need, have an opportunistic approach – talk to partners, customers and community experts to understand painpoints
One (1) market at a time – don’t spread your resources too thin
Assemble the right crew – send product expertise, hire local sales people
Involve product in the sales process
Focus on what your competitor lacks, rather than playing catch up trying to fill the gaps to your competitor
Underestimated localization: build integrations with local platforms/tools to help with adoption
Secure reference customers at any cost – noone can talk it like customers
Go narrow in your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) – your 5 first customers should describe the same pain
Marketing and Communication
Speak the local language
Be bold – find ways to call yourself a leader
Hire an industry expert to nail your language
Do events from day 1 – you need to create awareness, visibility and build local contact network
Don’t build without telling the community – regularly
Celebrate achievements and individuals often, and do it company-wide (internal comms) – this demonstrates leadership, builds culture, and strengthens employee engagement
Brand localization
One of the roundtable discussions at the event was about brand localization on an international scale, moderated by Jenny Sagström from B2B brand agency Sköna. 15 companies participated in the discussion and a number of challenges related to branding and internationalization were discussed at my table:
Picking a suitable brand name – do you stick to a Swedish brand name, translate the brand name and/or tagline to local languages when you go international, or rebrand and pick an international name that is easily pronounced and spelled in any country?
Visual identity and culture – Brand Guidelines and design systems that ensure global consistency while adapting imagery, tone of voice and lingo to regional customs or local culture.
Content that builds trust (articles, videos, social media posts, etc) – customer problems, needs and painpoints may differ between countries, so you may need to adjust the value prop, messaging and create content that resonates locally without straying from the company’s core positioning, wanted perception, and brand promise.
Rebranding after M&A – when you acquire or merge with another company, one of you (or both) will likely be subject to a rebrand. There are many reasons why you may choose to rebrand (instead of keeping separate brand names):
You may want to leverage the brand strength of either the acquiring or the acquired company (keep the strongest brand name) to stimulate more demand and increase overall market awareness for the combined company.
Create a single, cohesive (new) brand identity from multiple, potentially conflicting brand identities to reflect the new, combined business.
Signal a strategic shift – change in your business strategy, customer base, or target market, for example.
Save costs by consolidating similar products or services under a single brand, reducing duplication in marketing, branding, and management efforts.
Cultural and organizational integration – a new brand for both can serve as a unifying force.
Eliminate confusion between similar brand names, legal or support issues.
Modernize the brand's image, making it more appealing to current customer preferences.
Being a brand police – educating staff about correct usage of brand assets and templates, why it’s important with consistency, and stopping them from using old/incorrect logo versions, wrong colors or old templates after a rebrand.
I realized that what many scaleups are actually struggling with in all this is Change Management, i.e. handling the ”people” side of change when scaling a business.
I came to think of the Prosci® Methodology and the ADKAR® Model that I was first introduced to when I was working with a team of Change Managers during an Interim Management assignment at Capgemini six years ago. This methodology gives you a structured approach to prepare for, manage, and sustain organizational change. The idea is to guide an organization and its individuals through the change, and address any roadblocks or barrier points along the way. The ADKAR model describes five key stages you need to guide people through:
Awareness: Understanding the need for change – explain why you are are doing a brand refresh or rebranding and why it’s necessary to support your continued scaleup journey. Clearly communicate the purpose of the new brand and its advantages.
Desire: Building the motivation to participate in the change (what’s in it for me?) and switch to the new brand – explain the benefits of a strong brand, get people excited about the new positioning and branding, and on board with the (joint) culture and brand values.
Knowledge: Learning how to change – provide the necessary information and training on how to use the new brand; show how to use the Brand Guidelines, brand assets, new templates, etc.
Ability: Implementing the change in day-to-day activities – roll out the new brand identity across marketing, sales and product materials, on the website, and in product design. Offer internal ”brand clinics” to help functions and individuals convert their PowerPoint decks to the new brand design or make new slides or banners that follow the brand guidelines, select appropriate photos that follow the style guide, etc.
Reinforcement: Making sure the change sticks – provide ongoing support and incentives to sustain the change and prevent users from reverting to old habits.
I think these are useful principles to apply to brand management or any large change that comes with scaling up your business.
Let me know what you think. I am interested to know what challenges you see on your scale-up and internationalization journey and how we as marketing consultants can help you out.
Learn more
Scaling globally without losing yourself: Brand localization lessons from Monterro’s summit; article by Jenny Sagström, Sköna; Sept 4, 2025
Nordic Software Summit 2025 – Part 1: How to scale up your tech business
Nordic Software Summit 2025 – Part 3: The leadership journey
Prosci® Methodology and the ADKAR® Model
Text and photos: Mimmis Cleeren
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